Dr. Norman Oliver led the Virginia Department of Health from 2018–22 during Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam's term. His time as head of the agency overlapped with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As Virginia's former state health commissioner, he’s now warning that the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s recent decision to cut up to $425 million in federal funding for COVID-related grants makes Virginians more susceptible to future pandemics — and “horrific consequences.”
The following has been edited for clarity and style.
VPM News: Dr. Norman Oliver, thank you for joining me. Tell me about your time at [the Virginia Department of Health] and what were your primary initiatives.
Dr. Norman Oliver: I was the state health commissioner during the pandemic, and along with all of our colleagues in VDH and the Department of Emergency Management, we ran the state pandemic response.
Many of the issues and concerns that we had [were] getting good data on how we were doing on testing, and how many people were being tested, and how many cases were there, and where were the cases, and how many people were dying — you know, just doing all of the data collection, surveillance, data reporting and so on.
That requires lots of data infrastructure. And the data infrastructure in public health is, quite frankly, very old — antiquated. One of the important things that happened with this COVID-19 money was that we were able to begin the process of upgrading that data infrastructure — along with the workforce that's needed to do all of that kind of work.
After the pandemic, those monies were allowed to continue to be used for those same things, because those things are agnostic to the actual thing you're doing the surveillance on. To the extent that you build up a great data infrastructure, you can keep track of outbreaks of measles or flu, or other things that are really important for public health.
In addition, a lot of the money was being used in areas like childhood immunization — where we were seeing some slippage in gains that had been made in protecting that population.
During the COVID pandemic, childhood immunizations plummeted in Virginia and across the country, so trying to improve the immune status of our children was really a very important need. Now, with things like the measles outbreaks and so on that we're seeing around the country, it's underscoring that problem for us once again. A disease that was almost never seen in the United States, now we're seeing lots of cases.
The Trump administration has said it's cutting this grant money because the COVID pandemic is over. What's your reaction to that?
The money was allocated during the pandemic, but the money was allocated to build the public health infrastructure to fight not just COVID, but future threats to public health as well.
It's not money for COVID-19. It's money for public health, to defend us from things like COVID-19 and other communicable diseases — as well as the opioid epidemic.
We are still threatened by communicable diseases. We will, in fact, experience future pandemics. And the lesson we should learn from COVID-19 is that we need to be better prepared.
Money spent now preparing us for what will happen in the future is money well spent. In medical science, public health science, there's no question about whether or not we will have future pandemics. The only question is when. So, we need to be better prepared, and taking the money away now means that we will be less prepared.
We had just really begun the process of rebuilding the public health data handling systems. If you want to talk about waste, that's a real waste — to have spent several years working towards something, building something, and then [to] have the rug pulled out from under you in the midst of that work. That's a waste. You can't do surgery with a chainsaw.
I think what we're seeing is, through these wholesale cuts of programs, a situation where — assuming best intentions — we're going to see horrific consequences that perhaps are unforeseen by these folks. But those of us in public health are here to tell them that the consequences of this are going to be the loss of life.
What happens when funding is cut unexpectedly in public health?
Grants are always time limited. That [Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity] grant is one that comes in every several years. There's always a process whereby public health officials are planning and writing and submitting grants to take the place of the current grant when it runs out, so that the work can continue.
The work goes on, and we have always tried to maintain — as best as we could — continuous funding, meaning that you'd write and submit grant proposals while you were still operating under another grant. Abrupt loss of grant funding is something that you aren't planning for. If you know [a grant is] ending in ‘26 or ‘27, you're going to be writing a grant that would come into effect just as that other grant ended.
I suspect they had not done that yet. There's no line item in the state budget that's going to take the place of this. It's a huge blow to our public health infrastructure, and as I mentioned, it's already a threadbare operation.
Dr. Norman Oliver, former Virginia State Health Commissioner, thank you for speaking with me.
Excellent. I hope it's been helpful.
